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No winners emerge out of a consideration of the two key EU crises side-by-side: the ‘migration crisis’ – steady attempts by the EU and its Member States to switch off the effective enjoyment of the right to asylum already truncated by the Dublin system and national law – and the ‘rule of law crisis’, seeing Member States leave the club of functioning liberal democracies and pushing the Union in the direction of an association not based on particular values and harboring autocracies with destroyed checks and balances. Hungary is deployed as a case-study next to the EU itself to assess how the two ‘crises’ feed and amplify each other and which lessons emerge from the connection between them for the EU’s future. The conclusion is that everyone is losing face, since EU law, just like Hungarian law, is unable to ensure the safeguarding of asylum seekers’ rights by design. Moreover, recent ‘improvements’, from the EU-Turkey deal to the Hungarian policy of populist hate, showcase the feebleness of values and rampant double standards in a landscape of wanting legal remedies and empty proclamations of rights and principles. While the failed neighborhood policy and empty European values deliver thousands of dead in the Mediterranean, ‘illiberal’ Hungary and ‘value-based’ EU emerge as successful powerhouses of othering, hypocrisy and wanting legality, where double standards reign and scapegoating migration, especially ‘non-Western’ migration – up to the point of leaving thousands of people dead – brings steady political dividends.

This paper provides experimental evidence showing that members of a majority group systematically shift punishment on innocent members of an ethnic minority. We develop a new incentivized task, the Punishing the Scapegoat Game, to measure how injustice affecting a member of one’s own group shapes punishment of an unrelated bystander (“a scapegoat”). We manipulate the ethnic identity of the scapegoats and study interactions between the majority group and the Roma minority in Slovakia. We find that when no harm is done, there is no evidence of discrimination against the ethnic minority. In contrast, when a member of one’s own group is harmed, the punishment ”passed” on innocent individuals more than doubles when they are from the minority, as compared to when they are from the dominant group. These results illuminate how individualized tensions can be transformed into a group conflict, dragging minorities into conflicts in a way that is completely unrelated to their behavior. Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

International Law was solely concerned with States in the classical period which was influenced by the theory of state sovereignty. The transformation of the position of the individuals after the Second World War has been one of the most remarkable developments in contemporary International Law. The Charter of the United Nations by using the words “People of the United Nations” in the Preamble has given a place of importance to individuals. However, this alone did not change the position of individuals in the domain of International Law by virtue of having rights and duties flowing directly from International Law for the prevention of violation of Human Rights.

Taking Jair Bolsonaro, the President of Brazil, as case example, this article explores various manifestations of hatred, viewed from both an individual and societal perspective. Distinguishing between interpersonal and intergroup hatred, it is pointed out that hatred is like a contagious disease that has contributed to many atrocities. The article also discusses how hate-based populism uses ideologies as a bonding mechanism, describing the ways in which populist leaders use hatred to create ingroups and outgroups, uniting their constituencies through the use of the defense mechanisms of projection and splitting, and using outgroups as scapegoats. The dynamics of dehumanization are also explored. In addition, the article shows how the rise of social networking has made hatred more pernicious. It ends with suggestions about how hatred can be transcended and ways to overcome destructive feelings.

Aggressive behavior against out-group members often rises during periods of economic hardship and health pandemics. Here, we test the widespread concern that the COVID-19 crisis may fuel hostility against people from other nations or ethnic minorities. Using a controlled money-burning task, we elicited hostile behavior among a nationally representative sample (n=2,186) in the Czech Republic, at a time when the entire population was under lockdown. We provide causal evidence that exogenously elevating salience of the COVID-19 crisis magnifies hostility against foreigners. This behavioral response is similar across various demographic sub-groups. The results underscore the importance of not inflaming anti-foreigner sentiments and suggest that efforts to restore international trade and cooperation will need to address both social and economic damage.

Boston Public Schools tried to implement comprehensive change to school start times and bus schedules using a set of MIT-developed algorithms.The science was first-rate and the efforts to correct for historic inequities admirable. But because the algorithms optimized for equity and efficiency, at the expense of stability, the process foundered on public outrage. More might have been done to engage the public around the model and render more transparent the tradeoffs between various objectives. Absent such engagement, there's a risk of algorithmic scapegoating where the public blames the technology for political process failure.

Bill C-71 is fundamentally misguided. Public gun ownership does not threaten public safety. High-quality, peer-reviewed research finds no evidence that public gun ownership is linked to criminal violence. Based on StatsCan data, PAL holders are much less apt to commit murder than are other Canadians. Rural Canadians have more guns per capita than urban Canadians, but firearm homicide rates are lower in rural areas than in bigger cities. Guns can be mis-used, but they can also be used for good. It is vitally important to teach proper firearms handling at a young age. It teaches character. Bill C-71 falsely assumes gangsters get their guns from lawful domestic sources. This claim is based entirely on secret changes to the traditional definition of “crime gun.” There is no evidence that the source of crime guns has recently changed other than what is hidden in secret police reports. In reality -- only the definition has changed. The new definition of “crime gun” includes paper crimes -- firearms found at the homes of suicides and absent-minded PAL holders. But the police secretly changed the definition – to include “illegally acquired” – which now means that “found guns” are now “crime guns.” “Found guns” have not been used in a crime, but are just found by police during or after a contact, Any kind of contact, including suicides. This new definition equates paper crimes with criminal violence. A firearm unsafely stored – is a “crime gun.” The Minister uses “domestic sources” as if it meant PAL holders. This is false. There is a large pool of firearms with questionable legality. In 2001, between one-third and one-half of then-law-abiding Canadian gun owners declined to apply for a PAL or POL. Government has not provided solid justification why more regulations would improve public safety. Nor has the government published an evaluation of the present regulatory system showing that it is effective in preventing violence. Other than police claims, based on a secret, bloated definition, there is no support for a change in the source of crime guns. According to StatsCan, lawful owners cannot be a major source of crime guns. According to StatsCan data, PAL holders are much less apt to commit murder than are other Canadians.Increased regulatory complexity does not mean greater public safety. Additional rules merely increases the work load for the Firearms Program staff. This can only harass legitimate owners and decrease public safety. Why is the government scapegoating PAL holders?

The European Union is ‘externalizing’ responsibility for asylum seekers, but this effort only leads to more ethical, logistical, and human rights problems. The EU compels and/or finances Greece, Italy, and a number of African States to turn migrants around. Since asylum seekers must claim protection at the borders or inside the so-called Destination State, turning them around before they can reach Europe artificially lowers numbers of claimants. This process of arresting, detaining, and ejecting is called ‘interdiction’. It is meant to shore up the faltering Common European Asylum System (CEAS). However, detaining asylum seekers on the Greek Aegean Islands and in non-European States will only lead to more detention, more harm, and worsening conditions along the migrant route. Detention will not work to deter asylum seekers from reaching European shores. As it stands, campaigns like #opentheislands focuses too heavily on scapegoating Greece and its Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras. The confinement of asylum seekers to ‘hotspots’ on the Aegean Islands (namely Lesvos, Chios, Samos, Leros, and Kos) for periods ranging from months to more than a year, is a consequence of EU decisions and priorities. This article argues that while #opentheislands is a laudable campaign, we must also not lose sight of the complex, interrelated problems that cannot be resolved by externalization or transfers to the mainland: namely, that Greece serves as the gateway to Northern and Western Europe; that immigration detention in ‘hotspots’ and other externalization efforts will not work to deter migrants and asylum seekers from crossing the Mediterranean Sea and other dangerous routes; and that migration to Europe is natural, inevitable, and uncontainable by interdiction efforts.

In this paper we study the Black Death persecutions (1347-1352) against Jews in order to shed light on the factors determining when a minority group will face persecution. We develop a theoretical framework which predicts that negative shocks increase the likelihood that minorities are scapegoated and persecuted. By contrast, as the shocks become more severe, persecution probability may actually decrease if there are economic complementarities between the majority and minority groups. We compile city- level data on Black Death mortality and Jewish persecution. At an aggregate level we find that scapegoating led to an increase in the baseline probability of a persecution. However, at the city-level, locations which experienced higher plague mortality rates were less likely to engage in persecutions. Furthermore, persecutions were more likely in cities with a history of antisemitism (consistent with scapegoating) and less likely in cities where Jews played an important economic role (consistent with inter-group complementarities).

All over the world market-dominant minorities are victims of ethno-religious hatred and violence. This paper aims to test the theory that ethnic violence had pragmatic economic roots and ethnic violence was directly related to occupational segregation across ethnicities against the alternative “scapegoat theory,” according to which Jews were blamed for all economic misfortunes of the majority. In order to test these theories, we focus on pogroms between 1800 and 1939, i.e., episodes of anti-Jewish violence, in the Pale of Settlement, where Jews were confined to live within the Russian Empire. We combine a novel data set on pogroms and the professional and ethnic composition of the Russian Empire with data on historical climate and yield data. Using fixed-effects model, we document that heat stress in growing season, i.e., spring, leads to a fall in grain yield. Then, we exploit heat stress in spring as an exogenous source of variation in income and find that negative income shocks increase the likelihood of violence against Jews, but only during pogrom waves that are triggered by political turmoil. We find that the likelihood of anti-Jewish violence in the face of an income shock is higher in localities with a greater Jewish concentration among creditors. Our findings show that the ethno-economic segregation is an important determinant of violence against minorities.

Do economic sanctions turn the public against the target government or cause it to rally around the flag? Does the public response to sanctions depend on the sanctioner’s identity or on the partisanship of the respondent? These questions have very rarely been explored with survey data. Results from two surveys in Russia find that, in contrast to the “orthodox” and the “rally around flag” theories, economic sanctions do not have a direct effect on support for the sanctioned government. However, in line with “scapegoating” arguments, sanctions weaken the impact of economic decline on support for the government. In addition, public responses are shaped by partisan attitudes, but not by the identity of the sender. More generally, respondents may react more strongly to the reasons why sanctions were put in place than to the sanctions themselves. These results suggest the need to reevaluate theories of the impact of economic sanctions.

The explanation of organizational distrust missed covertly concealed managerial ignorance (hereafter: CCMI), a dark secret veiled on organizations’ dark side and facilitated by managers’ unknowing of their own ignorance and by unstudied “jumper” managers’ coping with gaps in local tacit know-how and phronesis (Greek for practical wisdom). Employees may trust “jumpers” coming from the outside who risk their own authority, expose their ignorance, learn, fill the gaps, and become competent, but managerial power enables defense of authority by using CCMI and camouflaging resulting mistakes and failures by bluffs, power abuses, scapegoating, and other subterfuges aimed at amoral careerism (AC). Anthropologists untangled subterfuges, but without becoming managers they missed how such defensiveness caused mutual distrust, curbed knowledge-sharing, learning, and problem-solving, furthering mistakes and failures in vicious distrust and ignorance cycles. A longitudinal study of five automatic processing plants by a management-educated and experienced semi-native anthropologist untangled that only few of their “jumper” executives, 7 of 32 studied, chose ignorance-exposing vulnerable involvement and became job-competent. As the import of “jumper” executives is now common, this problem is worsening and calls for solutions that are, suggested besides recommendations for further study.

The politics of othering has become increasingly visible in Britain’s mainstream political rhetoric and policies. This politics aims to disunite, alienate and dehumanise entire groups, specifically migrants and some minorities, and foster a culture in which xenophobia and racism no longer reside in the domain of the far-right. Brexit has been a catalyst for this, serving as an opportunity for mainstream politicians and various media outlets to wager their future power on villainising and scapegoating the migrant for the failures of neoliberal and hyper-capitalist policies; directing the electorate’s grievances to the “other.” The here presented paper aims to explore this racialized and racializing politics, which is by no means a new phenomenon, and assess its impact on those it targets. These impacts include a lack of decisive political action when faced with the Gordian knot of the refugee crisis, increased reports of hate crime and xenophobia and an erosion of minority rights. Against this background, this paper argues that this rhetoric places the very ideas of human dignity and equality under relentless assault, and results in a deliberate obfuscation of those who are truly responsible for the failure of neoliberal policies.

After widespread violence in 2008 and 2015, South Africa is now clearly one of most hostile destinations in the world for African migrants. Existing research on the determinants of South African xenophobia has focused on developing and advancing theories, with little attention paid to testing which theories, if any, actually account for mass xenophobia. This is the goal of this paper. By combining individual-level Afrobarometer survey items with municipal-level census indicators, we produce a rich, quantitative data set of numerous factors that have been proposed as determinants of South African xenophobia. The results of multilevel regression analyses show support for the explanations of poverty, relative deprivation, frustration with government, and social mobilization, with mixed evidence for resource competition. Taken together, the results point toward a mechanism of scapegoating, where frustrations and hopelessness produce aggression that is targeted at African immigrants.

Executives’ morality and ethics became major research topics after recent business scandals, but research missed a major explanation of executives’ amorality: career advancement by ‘jumping’ between firms that causes ignorance of job-pertinent tacit know-how and phronesis (Greek for practical wisdom), tempting ‘jumpers’ to conceal managerial ignorance (hereafter: CoMI) by detachment and/or autocratic seduction-coercion. CoMI causes a distrust and ignorance cycle, which engenders mismanagement that bars performance-based career advancement and encourages low-moral careerism (L-MC), advancing by bluffs, power abuse, scapegoating and other self-serving subterfuges. Though L-MC is a known malady of large organizations, its explanation missed ‘jumpers’ choice of CoMI, probably because the latter remained on organizations’ dark side through secrecy and conspiracies of silence. A 5-year semi-native anthropological study of five ‘jumper’-managed automatic processing plants and their parent inter-kibbutz co-operatives found common CoMI-induced L-MC among executives, 80% of CEOs and 72% of plant managers, versus only among some 25% of mid-levellers. This gradation of morality accorded power, authority and status ranking that made practicing CoMI-L-MC easier the higher one’s position; it is consistent with findings that show lower morality the higher one’s status (Piff et al., 2012) and supports the hypothesis that ‘jumping’ careers tend to nurture amoral executives. Ideas for remedies for this corporate malady are suggested, and further study of ‘jumpers’ coping with ignorance is called for.

The internet has made it possible for more people than ever before to publicize their political views. As a result, unfiltered voices have proliferated. This paper assesses the impact of the surge in opinion-making on the political discourse regarding European Muslims. I highlight the predominance of Islamophobic views mainly from non-Muslims and ex-Muslims as well as Europhobic voices of extremist Muslims. The rivals aggressively disseminate dualistic and essentializing portraits of Islamic civilization and of European (Western) civilization. Islamophobes deftly manipulate images of Islam as anti-democratic, misogynistic and militaristic and Europe as democratic, egalitarian and peace-loving to support their xenophobic political agenda. With equally shrewd appreciation of the power of symbolic politics, Europhobes essentially invert this stereotype common in mainstream European media. They portray Europe as hedonistic, hypocritical and sadistic and Islam as pious, genuine and just. I contend that, despite their expressed antipathy, Islamophobes and Europhobes actually depend on and feed off one another. Their mutual recriminations mutate into a largely hermetically sealed discourse and counter-discourse in which the outlandish distortions of the foe become the supporting evidence for the opposing adversary’s equally outlandish distortions and vice versa. Sadly, these purveyors of fear-mongering and scapegoating receive so much attention from the sensationalizing media that soberer voices go largely unheard.

Developing effective strategies to counter violent extremism (CVE) has proven to be elusive. Despite the plethora of conferences, reports, and expenditures, governments continue to struggle to find the right formula to decrease politically motivated violence. Because the underlying causes of violent extremism are complex and country specific: no one size fits all solution. Each nation must consider its unique economic, political, and social circumstances when seeking to protect its citizens from violence perpetrated by extremists. But government officials should be careful that their CVE strategies do not exacerbate the underlying marginalization, discrimination, and disenfranchisement that create fertile grounds for terrorist recruitment.This paper argues that America’s domestic CVE practices create a paradox: law abiding citizens and residents who openly and legally express their oppositional views or orthodox religious practices are targeted by the state in the form of surveillance, infiltration, investigation, entrapment, and prosecution. Thus, targeted communities reasonably suspect that the campaign against homegrown terrorism is not so much about public safety as it is about irrational bigotry. Members of these communities become less willing to cooperate with law enforcement because they view CVE as merely political scapegoating at the expense of their liberty and livelihoods. When contextualized within America’s aggressive police tactics in the 1960s and 1970s against civil rights, Black Nationalist, and anti-war groups and coupled with the disproportionate focus on African Americans in the ongoing War on Drugs, such suspicions are not far-fetched. Accordingly, this paper makes three recommendations that address the paradox of punishing the innocent for openly expressing grievances shared by the guilty, or worse merely sharing the same immutable characteristics. First, an effective program to counter violent extremism must prioritize protecting the ability of individuals to exercise civil and human rights without fear of state retribution. Second, the American governments must balance the tight rope between engaging Muslim communities to protect them from hate crimes or bolster public safety and heightened attention to Muslims that signals to the public that Muslims warrant extra scrutiny from the state. Selective engagement risks a backlash where the majority resents what it perceives as favoritism towards Muslims or interprets engagement efforts as legitimizing suspicion of Muslims. Either response often leads to private acts of discrimination or violence in employment, schools, mosques, and public places. Third, CVE programs that empower communities as stakeholders in preserving public safety and protection of rights must be careful not to perpetuate existing disparities within Muslim communities along gender, age, class, and race. Insensitivity to internal tensions risks placing the government as an enabler of intra-community gender bias, intra-community ethnic conflicts, and class divisions.In the end, the legitimacy of CVE policies hangs in the balance. The extent to which governments are able to uphold individual rights while preserving public safety directly contributes to defeating the use of violence as a means of seeking justice.

In summer 2011, the Common Market Law Review published a case-note dedicated to the legal analysis of the Ruiz Zambrano case of the CJEU, which is of great interest. Both of us fully agree with the authors, Professors Hailbronner and Thym, that the case is of fundamental importance in that it represents ‘a permanent move beyond the confines of “market citizenship”’ (1269), supplying one of the first examples when EU citizenship alone sufficed to the CJEU to bring the case within the scope of EU law, building on ‘EU citizenship as such’ (1263). This general agreement is one of the reasons why we are of the opinion that their note warrants a brief elaboration and rejoinder - in accord with tradition and Review practice.The note written by two eminent scholars falls short, in our respectful opinion, of reflecting the essence of the case in a sufficiently accurate and objective manner. We have two concerns: the treatment of the facts on the ground, and the legal conclusions that flow from the analytic treatment of these ‘facts.’ The combination of the two results in demonizing and blaming the immigrant family, especially employing unfortunate restrictionist cliches and stereotypes that present immigrants from the third world who come to Europe as selfish criminals abusing the law. This phenomenon of scapegoating, of course, occurs regularly in the EU and throughout the West, both through nativist legislation and through the public discourse, which has given way to hateful terms and provocative and derogatory argot.We do not suggest that anything crafted by Professors Hailbronner and Thym is inappropriate. However, we are concerned that their careful parsing of the facts as they might wish them to be, might deter others from actually reading the important case under consideration. Using the lenses we suggest allows a clearer view of the actual situation. Every day, various immigration and refugee authorities record and transmit facts, sometimes great and sometimes small and ordinary. Like false rumors that can become unrecognizable when retold over time, facts can get lost in the shuffle and morph into inconvenient facts. When this occurs for a terrorized family that finds itself enmeshed in a complex legal dispute, conducted in a foreign language, it is little wonder that such small details can get lost in translation and again in litigation. But, unlike these families, scholars can, and must take a step back and read carefully and appreciate the degrees of ambiguity and nuance inherent in the cases they read, drained of the lives they record.Leaving aside the philosophical discussion on global equality and possible justifications of closing the borders to prevent the arrival of the needy, our point is quite simple: legal scholarship should not mischaracterize the basic, constitutive facts that gave rise to a legal dispute at hand, especially in situations where the destiny of the most vulnerable and needy is decided, as occurs in immigration and refugee cases tried and adjudicated in the EU every day. We would conclude that facts in a case-note are particularly in need of care, when the facts might throw a shadow on the soundness of the derivative legal conclusions. With respect, we would dispute the treatment of the facts in the earlier case-note by professors Hailbronner and Thym, and would remand for reconsideration. We have learned much over the years from studying their earlier work, but the lesson learned here is not that which they intended.

The kibbutz is supposedly a high-trust society, but ethnography of a regional inter-kibbutz organization and its plants, administered by kibbutz members and operated by hired employees exposed negative managerial practices: amateurism, bluffing, concealing or camouflaging of mistakes and failures, scapegoating, favoritism, etc., which engendered mistrust and ineffectiveness, inefficiency, brain drain, conservative red tape, etc. Management by kibbutz members was supposed to enhance concern for kibbutz interests, but such concern was rare; innovative managers who tried to promote kibbutz interests mostly left due to colleagues’ animosity. Why did kibbutzim (Pl. of kibbutz) which owned this organization and formally controlled it do nothing about this mismanagement? The paper offer an answer.

This working manuscript examines Dateline NBC's installments of To Catch a Predator for a critique of the Anglo-American rubric of child sexual abuse, especially its fate in the apparent televisual “reality turn” of perversion. It uses work by Jean Baudrillard and Rene Girard in arguing that the medicolegal concept of the pedophile was launched as a ritualistic scapegoating but assumed what is theorized as a “fatal” escalation at the scene of its mass mediation.

Firing is a common response to performance failure. I consider an adverse selection model of firing, whereby firms differ in their ability to identify the incompetent workers that cause failure and the market imperfectly observes firms’ ability; consequently, firm value is based on reputation — an imperfect assessment of ability. In this context, I examine whether scapegoating, defined as random firing by a low-ability firm, can be an optimal, reputation-saving, value-maximizing strategy. I show that, in equilibrium, high-ability firms efficiently fire incompetent workers. In turn, low-ability firms scapegoat (pool with highability firms) with a probability that is increasing in reputation. From the market’s perspective, scapegoating represents the likelihood that the firm is poorly informed. I show that the unconditional likelihood of scapegoating is non-monotonic in reputation, while the conditional likelihood of scapegoating decreases in reputation.

I propose here the psychological attraction theory of financial regulation - that regulation is the result of psychological biases on the part of political participants - voters, politicians, bureaucrats, and media commentators; and of regulatory ideologies that exploit these biases. Some key elements of the psychological attraction approach are: salience and vividness, omission bias, scapegoating and xenophobia, fairness and reciprocity norms, overconfidence, and mood effects. This approach further emphasizes emergent effects that arise from the interactions of individuals with psychological biases. For example, availability cascades and ideological replicators have powerful effects on regulatory outcomes.